Speaker
Description
Recent experiments [1] have demonstrated laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) of quasi-monoenergetic electron bunches with energy up to 5 GeV, bunch charge up to tens of picocoulombs, and beam divergence down to milliradians using 20 cm long, low density ionization-injected plasma waveguides [2] using 240 TW peak power laser drive pulses. We present 3D particle-in-cell simulation results that expand the technique used in [1,2] to a longer (40 cm) low density plasma waveguide with the added features of a density up-ramp to mitigate dephasing and a narrowed (4 mm) injection section, demonstrating ~12 GeV electron beam with a charge of 8 pC and <20% energy spread. We also present results using the same laser parameters, delivering a 10X higher bunch charge of 83 pC in a quasi-monoenergetic 5 GeV beam with <5% energy spread. Such LWFA modules are key to the development of a multi-stage electron accelerator.
[1] B. Miao et al., Multi-GeV electron bunches from an all-optical laser wakefield accelerator, Phys. Rev. X 12, 031038.
[2] L. Feder et al., Self-waveguiding of relativistic laser pulses in neutral gas channels, Phys. Rev. Res. 2, 043173 (2020).
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the US Department of Energy (DESC0015516, LaserNetUS DE-SC0019076 / FWP#SCW1668, and DE-SC0011375), and the National Science Foundation (PHY1619582 and PHY2010511). ER is supported by National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (Grant No. DGE 1840340).
